[Abuja, Nigeria] Anglican unity will stand or fall on whether churches take the Jerusalem Declaration as their binding confession of biblical faith—or drift again into a hollow, man‑made religion, the Rt. Rev. Ashley Null warned. His address on 5 March, “The Jerusalem Declaration as Our Confession,” linked the movement now styling itself the Global Anglican Communion to the Reformation roots of Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer, arguing that Scripture‑anchored repentance and faith – not inherited structures or shared projects – must once again define Anglican identity and unity.
The G26 gathering, hosted by the Church of Nigeria from March 3-6, convened 347 bishops alongside 121 lay and clerical delegates during a time of profound global Anglican realignments. Organized by GAFCON, the event centered on prayerful discernment, culminating in the Abuja Affirmation’s recommitment to the Bible’s supreme authority. Dr. Null’s presentation on day three fit seamlessly into the theological plenaries, where speakers unpacked orthodoxy’s ancient roots against waves of contemporary revisionism. His dual role as a preeminent Cranmer scholar and North African bishop gave his words singular authority, forging vital connections between early church history and today’s trials.
Dr. Null, who serves as Bishop of North Africa in the Anglican Province of Alexandria, began with what he called “the sin principle in the Reformation,” taking as his lens the confession from Cranmer’s daily offices: “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep … and there is no health in us.” Line by line he unpacked the prayer as a spiritual diagnosis: humanity has followed “the devices and desires of our own hearts,” served “false gods of our own imagination,” and ended up on a “hamster wheel” of frenetic effort without true fruit. For this reason, he insisted, humanity does not merely need better moral instruction but a Redeemer who delivers us from “the numbing guilt and destructive power of our bondage to bad choices.”
Set against this bleak anthropology, Dr. Null turned to the “Comfortable Words” that Cranmer placed after the confession – Christ’s invitation to the weary, the proclamation of God’s love in John 3:16, Paul’s “true saying” that Jesus came to save sinners, and the assurance that we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. Here he traced a consistent pattern: God takes the initiative, reveals his holiness and our sin, atones for our rebellion, restores us to his presence, and by the Spirit “begins a good work in us” that he himself must bring to completion, echoing Philippians 1:6. This, Null said, is “the Gospel on which Anglicanism was founded,” and it remains the only solid basis for any talk of Anglican flourishing or mission.
From this theological foundation, Dr. Null turned to the presenting ecclesial crisis that brought bishops to Abuja. Echoing themes that ran through the week – including Archbishop Henry Ndukuba’s opening challenge from Joshua 24, “Choose this day whom you will serve” – he rejected the notion that Christian unity can be secured by “shared human values, inherited institutional structures or a common commitment to mission.” These, he argued, are “but the fruit of Christian unity, not its actual roots,” because unity in John 17 is a gift of union with Christ given as believers trust the words the Father gave the Son.
On Dr. Null’s reading, communion in Christ is therefore something Anglicans must receive rather than achieve: “God’s work in our hearts and in our relationships,” effected through his Word and “its proclamation in the sacraments.” When Anglicans instead seek unity in institutional continuity or in mission understood apart from a shared confession, they inevitably construct what he called a “false unity, based on good intentions, but hopelessly flawed by the flattering lies of our self‑deceptions.” The Abuja Affirmation, released the following day, would take up precisely this point, describing the Global Anglican Communion as “a confessional communion” whose fellowship is defined by the Jerusalem Declaration and the Reformation formularies rather than by the historic Canterbury‑based instruments.
Dr. Null devoted the heart of his address to showing that the Jerusalem Declaration stands in continuity with the Reformation settlement that produced the Thirty‑Nine Articles, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal. Cranmer, Jewell and Hooker, he reminded his hearers, cherished the ancient creeds and shared Augustine’s “pessimistic view of human nature,” reading Scripture with the fathers while insisting that the Bible interpret itself “using clearer passages to explain more obscure ones.” They reformed the English church when “human good intentions” had displaced divine revelation, particularly in the medieval insistence on perfect personal righteousness as a condition for salvation, which Dr. Null termed “an utter pastoral disaster.”
The Reformers’ legacy, he said, was a church “authentically catholic and biblically reformed”: gospel preaching, Scripture‑laced liturgy, and ancient order held together under the authority of the Word written. Article 34’s insistence that the church must maintain the “eternal truths of the Bible” while proclaiming them afresh “for each and every country, culture and era” provided the hermeneutical bridge to Gafcon’s contemporary work. Against that backdrop, Dr. Null portrayed the Jerusalem Declaration as a retrieval, not an innovation – a summary that “calls Anglicans back to our first love, to our historic faith and morals, to our founding formularies and ancient creeds,” and so offers “the only enduring basis for Anglican identity.”
He highlighted several features of the Declaration that have been repeatedly cited at Gafcon gatherings since 2008: its affirmation of Scripture as “the Word of God written” containing “all things necessary for salvation,” to be “translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense”; its insistence that contemporary interpretation remain “respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading”; and its reaffirmation of the four ecumenical councils, three historic creeds, the Thirty‑Nine Articles, the 1662 Prayer Book, and the Ordinal. In language that mirrored his earlier video catechesis on the Declaration, Dr. Null stressed that these commitments give Anglicans not only a doctrinal anchor but “a very specific way of interpreting Scripture in the midst of controversy”: seeking the unity of Scripture and then communicating that unity to the culture without capitulating to it.
The address then pivoted to a sharp diagnosis of contemporary Anglicanism. By the twenty‑first century, Dr. Null contended, “a growing number of Anglican values, structures and mission had been cut from their Scriptural roots,” as “cultural capitulation began to masquerade as cultural accommodation.” Once again, “human good intentions had replaced divine Gospel revelation,” producing what he called “decay in the true knowledge of God” and a corresponding erosion of Anglican unity.
In response, Dr. Null underscored the Jerusalem Declaration’s commitment to worship that is “faithful to the biblical theology of the Prayer Book” yet “locally adapted for each culture,” a formulation he said “affirms cultural accommodation but unequivocally rejects cultural capitulation – the root cause of the current crisis in Anglicanism.” For the sake of mission, he noted, the Declaration also recommits Anglicans to evangelism grounded in grace alone – “to seek to restore a sinful humanity to God by his grace through faith in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit” – while at the same time calling them to steward creation, uphold justice, and seek the relief and empowerment of the poor and needy.
Yet even these missional commitments, Dr. Null insisted, cannot bear the weight of ultimate hope. Because of human frailty, the Declaration looks for the fullness of God’s purposes not to ecclesial strategies but to “the glorious return of Christ who will then make all things new, including us.” Thus his argument came full circle: the same Reformation conviction about pervasive sin and radical grace that drove Cranmer’s reforms now stands behind Gafcon’s attempt, in Abuja, to reorder global Anglican life around a confessed gospel rather than contested institutions.
Dr. Null concluded with a direct appeal to the bishops and leaders gathered in Abuja, all of whom had already affixed their names to the Jerusalem Declaration as part of the G26 process. To assent to the Declaration, he said, is to return to these truths “not because those who do are so much more righteous than others, but because they are not.” The same sin principle he had expounded at the outset applies to every signatory, and thus the call of Abuja is not triumphal separation but deeper repentance, faith, and obedience shaped by Scripture and the formularies.
“May God who has given us the desire to embrace its truths in our hearts,” he prayed, “renew now our will to live them out in our lives, today, tomorrow, and every day, until we each meet Jesus face to face.” Only on that path, Dr. Null concluded, lies “the hope for full and lasting communion in Anglicanism” – a hope that Gafcon’s leaders believe is now being expressed in the emerging structures and self‑understanding of the Global Anglican Communion. In Abuja, at least, the choice set before Anglican leaders was framed not in terms of rival jurisdictions but of confession: whom, and what, will Anglicans choose to serve.
George Conger
– March 7, 2026
